


room for one more troubled soul

by HearJessRoar



Series: Camp Bright Moon [2]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, camp bright moon verse, its self indulgent af sue me, just them being in a happy stable supportive relationship in my camp au k
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25477171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HearJessRoar/pseuds/HearJessRoar
Summary: People didn't always understand them, but that was okay.Entrapta, Hordak, and the aftermath of losing one of the things you love most in the world to bankruptcy because you're both really bad at finances, oops.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Series: Camp Bright Moon [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1788703
Comments: 20
Kudos: 97





	room for one more troubled soul

“It’s done.”

Startled just as she was rolling out from underneath the car, Entrapta misjudged the distance and smacked her head on the bumper of her own Echo.

Well, what _used_ to be an Echo. It was more of a mish mash of whatever parts she’d been able to Frankenstein onto it at this point, and Entrapta loved it so very much. It might not have been what the courthouse called "street legal" anymore, but who cared? 

She called it Emily.

Right now though, she could have done without the little love tap to her forehead. Groaning, she rubbed at the spot and put her head between her knees.

Hordak was by her side immediately, crouched on the floor and unsure of what to do with his hands as she grumbled in pain. He looked like he felt guilty for surprising her, and Entrapta wouldn’t stand for that.

“You’re gonna get oil all over your pants again,” she said, waving him off with a wide smile. Then, she remembered what he’d said that’d made her jump, and her face fell. She reached up to tug the end of one of her braids, inevitably streaking the dyed purple with black car gunk. “It’s gone, then?”

Hordak nodded, and to anyone else he’d have looked stoic as ever, but Entrapta could see the pain in his eyes clear as she could see a misfiring cylinder in a V6 engine. She reached for his hand, knowing he wouldn’t care that her fingers were smeared with gritty engine grease and oil.

“It’ll be okay. Glimmer said we could keep our jobs,” she squeezed his hand reassuringly, pushing to her feet and pulling him with her. She gave the red mechanic’s creeper a kick and sent it rolling across the smooth floor of the garage, back to her toolbox. “We just have to face it, Hordak. We’re really good at blowing things up, and not so good at managing our finances,” she gestured grandly to her autoshop at large. “The only reason I haven’t sunk this place is because my dad paid off the mortgage.”

“And you’re unlicensed.”

“And I’m unlicensed,” she agreed. This was a well-worn conversation. “They can’t tax me properly if the business doesn’t technically exist! Which I’m pretty sure makes me a genius.”

“It makes you a fugitive from the IRS.”

“That too.”

It was comfortably quiet between them as Entrapta wiped her hands off on a fresh rag from the bucket. Then she scrubbed the grit off of his hand for him, since she was the one who put it there. Returning to work on her own grease-encrusted fingernails, she took a moment to admire him as he leaned hip-first on the hoist support, checking his phone. His hair would need dyed again soon, she decided, noting the shock of white coming in at his roots. She had never figured out if the white hair was part of his vitiligo, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t, and at this point in their relationship, it seemed rude to ask.

He always seemed so uncomfortable in blue jeans, and she loved that he wore them at her request any time he had to visit her in the shop. As nice as his legs looked in his preferred skirts, Entrapta preferred him not to get caught in a machine and mangled just because of some loose fabric.

He looked good in the jeans, too.

Unzipping the top of her coveralls and tying the sleeves about her waist so she could cool off in the warm May afternoon, she asked if he had plans for dinner.

Her plans had been to keep working on Emily, and maybe try to integrate a new sat nav into the clunky Gremlin that she’d found online last week for a steal. But he looked sad, and Entrapta had promised herself that she would work on her relationships with other people’s feelings. She was getting better at reading emotions, though most body language would forever elude her.

“I had nothing particular in mind,” he said, and then he did that thing where he clearly wanted to smile and couldn’t, and it came out like a smirk instead. “I did happen to see your favorite food truck parked outside the laundromat on main street.”

Entrapta squealed, unable to stop the excited bounce she did as she tossed the now soiled rag into the basket of used cloths. “Ooh, I heard they finally added sticks to the mini corndogs. How can something be mini if it doesn’t look exactly like the fullsize?”

“They listened to you at last, anyway.”

Entrapta jerked her thumb over her shoulder to Emily, with half the car’s innards laying on the floor. “We’ll have to take your car. Let me change my pants.”

He was very particular about his car, and with good reason. Entrapta would never, ever risk getting oil on his upholstery. His Camaro meant too much to him to even tempt fate with her grubby work clothes.

Walking towards the back office and not really caring if he saw her or not since he’d seen it a million times before, Entrapta shucked the coveralls off the rest of the way and continued her pace in her tank top, underwear, and sneakers.

“The garage door is open and we face the street, you know.”

The neighbors had seen worse.

Tugging on the spare set of jeans she kept in the desk for exactly this purpose, Entrapta stepped back into her shoes and left the office buttoning the fly. 

He was staring at her.

Hordak did that sometimes, and it always took her by surprise. To this day she was never really sure what he was seeing that made him look at her so contemplatively.

She fiddled with her hands, remembering at the last second to lock the office door. As she turned to do so, taking the key off the necklace she always wore tucked into her tank top, a soft, heavy weight settled on her from behind.

_oh._

He had wanted a hug.

Hordak could never just outright _ask_ when he wanted comfort, and that had been a point of contention between them several times. Entrapta had a hard time reading intention, and Hordak had a hard time voicing the softer side of his wants. But they made it work.

Letting him sag against her as his arms wrapped around her waist, Entrapta continued locking the door. She tucked the key back into her shirt and reached up blindly to stroke his cheek as he settled his chin on the crown of her head.

Entrapta knew she was very short by nearly everyone's standards, and Hordak was very tall. This was probably really bad for his back. Still, she let him lean on her for as long as he wanted, eventually wiggling free enough to turn around and hold him in return.

When she pulled away just a little, she noted with dismay that the grease in the ends of her hair had transferred onto Hordak’s white tee shirt. She scritched at it with a fingernail hopelessly, giving him a sheepish smile. "Sorry."

Hordak waved off her concerns, breaking away and instead offering his hand to her. She took it and let him lead her out of the shop, scooping up her backpack as they passed her bench. Blinking owlishly in the glow of the late afternoon sun, she dug out the remote for the door from the depths of her bag, and watched carefully as the segmented door rattled slowly shut in front of them.

"I think I need a new motor for that," she murmured absently.

He held the passenger door open for her as she crawled into the front seat, dropping her bag behind her with a heavy thud. As always, she ran her hands over the leather, marveling at the stitch work Hordak had completed when he had reupholstered it last year.

She still remembered the day he brought the Camaro home.

There had been no discussion beforehand, just him setting the keys down in front of her at the workbench, and in the second it took for her to process that, it was like the last sign she needed that Prime really was dead, and that they could _breathe._

They could have used the inheritance for the science camp, she supposed.

But Hordak had _needed_ the Camaro, one of the things his older brother had told him he never could have, not while he lived. He needed it in the way that anyone living under the thumb of a tightfisted tyrant needed their freedom, and if the Chevy wasn't a rumbling representation of that freedom then she didn't know what was.

Entrapta couldn't ever find it in her to fault him for the purchase. He had wanted it for so long.

They had both attended the funeral, of course, if only to keep up appearances. Not that Entrapta gave two shits about appearance, but Hordak did, and she cared about him. So she stood in the rain and watched them bury the complete rat of a human being who had for so long kept the man she loved so downtrodden.

And by the end of the month, a shiny, freshly waxed 1976 Camaro had a permanent residence in their garage.

Entrapta couldn't imagine a better _fuck you_ to Prime.

She danced her fingers over the radio dials, wondering if he would ever let her install the stereo she had put together for him.

"Kaddy called today," she said, twisting the bass to tune it. Hordak gave a noncommittal hum. "You need to call him back."

Trying to get Hordak to talk to his twin brother was almost always like pulling teeth. He'd gotten it into his head years ago that Entrapta somehow liked Kaddy better than she liked him, despite the fact that they ran two separate businesses together, not to mention owned a house together, and she'd never been able to fully disabuse him of the notion.

His insecurity was a byproduct of being under the control of an absolute shitheel cult leader of an older brother, she knew, and she would never hold it against him. Years of being told he was worthless couldn't be magically fixed just because she loved him.

But it helped.

She had just rotated the tires for him last week, and replaced the shocks while she was at it, because she had been bored and alone with her boyfriend's car and didn't often get the opportunity to fiddle with it and anyway, the ride was smoother than it had ever been.

She watched the town roll by in blurry, fast fading flashes, her arm hanging out the open window to catch the bursts of early summer breeze against her open palm.

They pulled into a spot two doors down from the food truck. She took great care not to kick the door open like she would with Emily.

"Do you want me to order for you today, or are you coming with?" Entrapta asked, stretching her arms over her head. Her back made a satisfying pop.

Hordak gave her a contemplative look, deciding. She waited patiently.

"I'll go with you today."

Entrapta clapped, grinning at him. Sometimes he was in too much pain to stand in line with her, the nerves in his legs flat out refusing to use their receptors correctly. She had fully expected him to stay in the car today, especially after how draining selling the camp had to have been for him.

But he must have felt okay otherwise. He even offered her his arm, and she took it, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow. A good arm day, _and_ a good leg day, that didn’t happen very often.

Even so, she was glad there was only one person ahead of them when they approached. She really didn’t want him to push himself. Not again.

Entrapta had the passing thought that if she could resurrect Prime just to shoot him, she just might do it.

It was his fault that Hordak pushed himself into being sick, and didn’t take the breaks he needed, and was convinced that his chronic pain was some sort of divine punishment. It’d taken her _years_ to get anywhere near getting those thoughts out of his head, and even then it was mostly her getting him into therapy. He was better now, but he still had an awful tendency to ignore when his body had had _enough._

She kept a careful note of exactly how much he was leaning on her as they stood, and satisfied that he wasn’t just saying he was fine, let it go for now.

When their orders were up, she made him carry both so that she could keep an arm around his waist, and he let her. Of course, he rolled his eyes like a drama queen about it, but Entrapta ignored him.

Leant on the hood of the Camaro, she marveled over how cute the mini corndogs were now that they actually looked like miniature corndogs, sticks and all. Hordak smiled indulgently at her, picking listlessly at the mac and cheese bowl he had ordered. Anything else from the truck tended to be a little bit much for his stomach to handle, and she loved that he brought her here just to make her happy even if it wasn’t his favorite.

People didn’t always understand them, but that was okay.

Other people filtered past, some offering her a wave or a greeting. Most everyone in town knew her, she was aware. Whether or not they _liked_ her was a different story altogether. Still, nobody had ratted her out to the IRS, and people still brought their cars and lawnmowers and toasters and microwaves to her, usually when they were desperate and short on cash. Entrapta figured that was probably a good sign. 

And despite the fact that they had had some unfortunate run ins in the past, she had managed to stay on friendly terms with both Camp Bright Moon and the lakeside marina over the years, enough that Glimmer had been startled when Entrapta had asked about keeping their jobs when The Fright Zone went under.

The younger woman had stared at her, and if Entrapta had been another sort of person, she might have taken that as a bad sign. But she wasn’t, so she didn’t, and Glimmer had shaken out of her stupor with a laugh and a promise that they always had a place at the camp that she and Hordak had helped build.

It hadn’t been their fault, she reasoned with herself. How were they to know that Prime’s funding would be rerouted? The petty bastard would to have loved to know he’d pulled one more fast one on his little brother after his death, taking away one of the few things that brought Hordak any happiness.

Yeah, she definitely would shoot him if he got resurrected, she decided. Morals, schmorals.

Someone went screaming by, flying out of the laundromat with an armful of large basket, brimming with freshly laundered sheets. Entrapta blinked.

“Wasn’t that Bow?”

Hordak shrugged. “I think it was, yes.”

“Huh.”

They both watched as Bow scrambled down the street, trying to keep the sheets from dropping to the ground as he fumbled with the keys to his car, clearly spooked about something.

She looked back at the door to the laundromat, propped open with a broken piece of brick. The owners had never sprung for air conditioning, no matter how many times Entrapta had offered to get them an easy to install window unit on the cheap, and instead got by with forcing the door open all day long.

Except...she squinted.

Something large and black floated with a familiar grace near the door. It continued on its flight path, followed by two more of its kind.

Ah.

“The laundromat is full of wasps,” she said. She bit into a corndog and chewed thoughtfully. “Do you think they’d let me install air conditioning _now?_

“Maybe if you promise to make it a factory standard unit.” he said, a thin smile tugging at his lips. She elbowed him playfully, careful not to hurt him.

“I set ours on fire _one_ time and you won’t let it go.”

“Never.”

She pouted, shoveling the other half of the corndog into her mouth. “You lit someone else’s dock on fire, _twice_ , and I never bring _that_ up.”

His smile disappeared, and Entrapta felt her stomach drop. Of course he didn’t want to be reminded of the misadventures from the science camp they’d just lost, how could she have forgotten already?

She licked at the grease on her lip and set down the empty paper basket on the hood. “Hey,” she said, trying to project as much confidence as she could into her voice. “It _will_ be okay. We’ll keep getting to do what we’ve been doing, and look on the bright side,” she gave him her cheeriest smile. “If we break something, it’s Glimmer’s problem now!”

He barked a startled laugh and the weight in her soul lifted just a bit. She wiped her fingers on her jeans so she could wrap them around his wrist.

Entrapta didn’t really like looking people in the eye, but for him she could, and she did. “It’ll be okay,” she repeated. It really was becoming her mantra of the day.

It would probably be her mantra of the summer, the way things were going.

But they had a few weeks to get the camp up to Glimmer’s standards, and to save it and their jobs, they’d do whatever she wanted them to. It _would_ be okay.

Hordak offered her the mostly full bowl of mac and cheese, and she took it despite it not being nearly cute enough for her liking. She stared at the clouds rolling in across the sunset, the cooling wind toying with her braids. “Think it’ll rain?”

“Yes.”

“We better go make sure the front windows are shut,” she said, worrying her lip. “I burnt the coffee this morning and had to air out the house.”

“I’ll fix the machine,” he promised.

 _I’ll fix it_ was as good as _I love you_ if you asked Entrapta. She absolutely could have fixed the coffee maker herself, but he wanted to spare her the trouble. Her heart felt like it was swelling. Impulsively, she reached over to grab his wrist again, bringing the back of his hand to her lips to press a kiss to the veins there.

Words got complicated. Entrapta could take old things and graft them with new things as easy as counting, but people and words and emotions? Those were difficult. Hordak understood.

She loved that about him.

And he didn’t want to fix _her_.

That was the important part. He didn’t want to fix her, and she didn’t want to fix him, because people weren’t meant to be repaired because people like them weren’t really broken. Patched, maybe. She wanted to help, to figure out what she could do to make his life easier, better for him. But he wasn’t a cracked cylinder, and she wasn’t a broken strut, and people weren’t machines. That was something she thought she maybe understood better than the general population did.

She thought maybe people needed to learn the difference between _I’ll fix you_ and _I’ll fix it for you, if you’ll let me._ They might be a whole lot happier if they knew.

**Author's Note:**

> me, raised by chevy people: "prime drove a _ford_."
> 
> first time posting for entrapdak, i am very nervous bc entrapta is a character very close to my heart. ive never seen a representation of someone so much like me before, even if her special interests are different from mine. anyway i hope i did her justice. ive been toying around with this part of my camp bright moon au for awhile now, and im very anxious to post it. if you liked it and want to know more about the verse, please check out my other works!
> 
> if you hated it pls don't tell me i am sensitive 
> 
> bow and the wasps will return.


End file.
